On Friday, former New York narcotics officers Edward Martins and Richard Hall were given five years’ probation, with no jail time, for their part in the arrest and alleged rape of an 18-year-old teen the two detectives picked up while on duty in September 2017. In a secretive hearing, both former officers pleaded guilty to 11 charges, including bribery and misconduct. Prosecutors had asked for 1-3 years of jail time for the ex-cops—both Hall and Martins have been free on bond during the whole trial, and have not spent any time behind bars. Kings County Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun, who gave out the light sentence, reportedly called the accuser’s credibility “seriously, seriously questionable, at best.”
The victim’s version of events begins when the two officers came upon her and two men hanging out in a parked car in Brooklyn. The officers, finding marijuana, arrested the then-teenager, who uses the name “Anna Chambers” in her self-advocacy, and let the men go. Chambers says the officers put her in the back of their unmarked minivan and drove to another location, where they proceeded to take turns raping her, offering a perverse contract that would allow her to go free without being arrested. Surveillance video confirms that the cops then dropped her off on a corner. Chambers promptly went to the hospital to have a rape kit administered; both officers’ semen was found. Both Martins and Hall, unable to deny they had sex with the accuser, claimed that the sexual assault was consensual.
Fact: It is impossible for there to be consensual anything between a law enforcement officer and the person they have in their custody. Yet Martins and Hall had a giant loophole in their favor, which was the fact that New York, and nearly three dozen other states, didn’t strictly prohibit officers from having supposedly consensual sex with people in custody. The “consensual sex” loophole became the two officers’ most significant defense. And even though Chambers’ case pushed New York lawmakers to finally close that loophole in April of last year, prosecutors ultimately could not retroactively apply it to this case.
It took over six weeks before prosecutors finally charged the two officers with rape, despite the loophole. The credibility of the teen was, predictably, soon called into question. Inconsistencies in Chambers’ story that are pretty normal for someone who has experienced a traumatic event were seized upon by defense attorneys, despite the fact that none of those inconsistencies included changing her story about being raped. Since the law was also still on the cops’ side, prosecutors declined to move forward with the rape charges in March.
Prosecutors in Brooklyn on Wednesday said they believe that sexual conduct between an officer and a person in custody should be a crime.
“However, that was not the law at the time of the incident,” the District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. “Because of this and because of unforeseen and serious credibility issues that arose over the past year and our ethical obligations under the rules of professional conduct, we are precluded from proceeding with the rape charges.”
Both officers resigned from their positions; they were not fired. Keep that in mind. These two men didn’t lose their jobs, the least that could have been done in the case of two men who are by the most conservative standards grotesquely incompetent at their jobs. Today, Hall and Richards are officially free to live their lives, without a moment spent behind bars; meanwhile, Chambers, after two years of fighting, is left with no real justice served in her case, aside from the major impact she had on state law.